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February 7 - March 5, 2020
In this, our third installment, we expand on these ideas, examining what happens when independent lines of accelerating technology (artificial intelligence, for example) converge with other independent lines of accelerating technology (augmented reality, for example). Sure, AI is powerful. Augmented reality is too. But it’s their convergence that is reinventing retail, advertising, entertainment, and education—just to name a few of the major transformations still ahead.
every major industry on our planet is about to be completely reimagined.
By mid-2019, over $1 billion had been invested in at least twenty-five different flying car companies.
“Uber’s goal,” explained Holden from the stage, “is to demonstrate flying car capability in 2020 and have aerial ridesharing fully operational in Dallas and LA by 2023.” But then Holden went even further: “Ultimately, we want to make it economically irrational to own and use a car.”
Put all this together, and by 2027 or so, you’ll be able to order up an aerial rideshare as easily as you do an Uber today. And by 2030, urban aviation could be a major mode of getting from A to B.
we introduced the notion of exponentially accelerating technology; that is, any technology that doubles in power while dropping in price on a regular basis.
in 2023 the average thousand-dollar laptop will have the same computing power as a human brain (roughly 1016 cycles per second). Twenty-five years after that, that same average laptop will have the power of all the human brains currently on Earth.
once a technology becomes digital—that is, once it can be programmed in the ones and zeroes of computer code—it hops on the back of Moore’s Law and begins accelerating exponentially.
The new news is that formerly independent waves of exponentially accelerating technology are beginning to converge with other independent waves of exponentially accelerating technology.
Solitary exponentials disrupt products, services, and markets—like when Netflix ate Blockbuster for lunch—while convergent exponentials wash away products, services, and markets, as well as the structures that support them.
Whenever a new technology offers a tenfold increase in value—cheaper, faster and better—there’s little that can slow it down.
This is why people have a tough time saving for retirement or staying on a diet or getting regular prostate exams—the brain believes that the person who would benefit from those difficult choices isn’t the same one making those choices.
Every time a technology goes exponential, we find an internet-sized opportunity tucked inside. Think about the internet itself. While it seemingly decimated industries—music, media, retail, travel, and taxis—a study by McKinsey Global Research found the net created 2.6 new jobs for each one it extinguished.
He’s developed first-person VR experiences illustrating racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination. For instance, experiencing what it would be like to be an elderly, homeless, African-American woman living on the streets of Baltimore produces lasting change in users: a significant shift in empathy and understanding.
And we can go on like this for a while. Smart objects don’t just bridge the gap between worlds, they gamify the world. If blockchain is a science-fiction technology that’s become science fact, then smart objects seem to invert this process, turning regular reality back into science fiction.
The only constant is change, and the pace of change is accelerating—this
“saved time” turns out to be one of the major benefits of technology.
The very first crowdfunding project took place in 1997, when the British prog-rock band Marillion raised $60,000 through online donations to finance a US tour.
A business model is the systems and processes a company uses to generate value.
“The basic rules of the game for creating and capturing economic value were once fixed in place for years, even decades, as companies tried to execute the same business model better than competitors did,”
The Smartness Economy: In the late 1800s, if you wanted a good idea for a new business, all that was required was to take an existing tool, say a drill or a washboard, and add electricity to it—thus creating a power drill or a washing machine. In his excellent book The Inevitable, author and Wired cofounder Kevin Kelly points out that we’re about to see an updated version of this economy, with AI replacing electricity. In other words, take any existing tool, and add a layer of smartness. So cell phones became smartphones and stereo speakers became smart speakers and cars become autonomous
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The next iteration of this idea is the Transformation Economy, where you’re not just paying for an experience, you’re paying to have your life transformed by this experience.
“Most [organizations] think the key to growth is developing new technologies and products. But often this is not so. To unlock the next wave of growth, companies must embed these innovations in a disruptive new business model.”
@gabrielhdm
Better meaning new business models do what all business models do—solve problems for people in the real world better than anyone else. Cheaper is obvious. With demonetization running rampant, customers—and that means all of us—are expecting more for less. But the real shift is the final shift: faster. New business models are no longer forces for stability and security. To compete in today’s accelerated climate, these models are designed for speed and agility. Most importantly, none of this is in any danger of slowing down.
“It’s likely [that we’re] just another ten to twelve years away from the point that the general public will hit longevity escape velocity.”
AI makes retail cheaper, faster, and more efficient, touching everything from customer service to product delivery. It also redefines the shopping experience, making it frictionless and—once we allow AI to make purchases for us—ultimately invisible.
On average, consumers using Amazon Echo spent more than standard Amazon Prime customers: $1,700 versus $1,300.
According to a recent Zendesk study, good customer service increases the possibility of a purchase by 42 percent, but bad customer service translates into a 52 percent chance of losing that sale forever—meaning more than half of us will stop shopping at a store due to a single disappointing customer service interaction.
With their technology, 40 percent of all customer service interactions are now resolved with a high degree of satisfaction and without any human intervention.
The End of the Supply Chain: With 3-D printing, retailers can now purchase raw materials and print inventory themselves, either at warehouses or in the retail outlet. This means the end of suppliers, manufacturers, and distributors.
The End of Waste: Okay, maybe not the complete end of waste, but with consumers preferring eco-friendly products and retailers looking to minimize materials cost, the exactitude of 3-D printing is a ready-made solution.
The End of the Spare Parts Market: If you’re a farmer in Iowa and your tractor breaks during harvest time, waiting a few days for a spare part could jeopardize the entire season. A 3-D printer solves this problem. And it’ll solve the same problem for everything from coffeemakers to skateboard wheels. This doesn’t just mean an end to the s...
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The Rise of User-Designed Products: Sure, there will always be some version of Apple in the market—an uber design-centric company pushing out products so slick they always find a buyer. Yet, for everything from fashion to furniture, customer-design...
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As a vestige of the agrarian economy, mothers made birthday cakes from scratch, mixing farm commodities (flour, sugar, butter, and eggs) that together cost mere dimes. As the goods-based industrial economy advanced, moms paid a dollar or two to Betty Crocker for premixed ingredients. Later, when the service economy took hold, busy parents ordered cakes from the bakery or grocery store, which, at $10 or $15, cost ten times as much as the packaged ingredients. Now, in the time-starved 1990s, parents neither make the birthday cake nor even throw the party. Instead, they spend $100 or more to
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So much, in fact, that we’ve started to take our stuff for granted. As a result, for many, experiences—tactile, memorable, and real—have become more valuable than possessions.
Shopping becomes healthcare becomes entertainment becomes education and so forth. Or, as we’ll see in the next section, our malls become a memory, as shopping itself becomes another task outsourced to your AI.
Passive media means information flows in only one direction. It’s traditional newspapers, magazines, television, movies, and this book. Active is the opposite. It means the information flows both ways, and finally, the user gets to have their say.
The technology doesn’t just change how we feel and act in the virtual, but how we feel and act in the actual. In other words, VR unlocks the possibility of an entirely different kind of moral education.
So you’ve got to ask yourself, if the curing of one disease is a miracle of the biblical variety, what do you call the curing of sixteen thousand?
However, the single most important question you can ask as you interview your surgeon is “How many times have you performed this procedure?” More importantly, “How many times have you performed it today?” Surgeons with the most practice in the widest variety of conditions produce the best results. This is why, ten years from now, when you’re wheeled into the operating room and see a human doctor, your immediate response will be: “No way. I want the robot.”
Cancer is the number two killer in the world, and placentas are abundant. There are over a hundred million births per year, and 99 percent of those placentas are thrown away. Saving this supply gives us the potential to manufacture these medicines cheaply and at scale.
It was also a game of statistics. In both health and life insurance, the premiums of the healthy cover the costs of the unhealthy. But the healthy end up paying unnecessarily high premiums for this privilege, making them the consistent losers of this particular game.
In a few years, humans will become the first animals that get their protein from other animals without any animals being harmed along the way.
We’re not lacking in technological know-how. We are water-wise, but execution dumb, attacking a biosphere-wide problem with a piecemeal approach.
When it comes to energy, it’s not about scarcity, it’s about accessibility—which is the exact kind of problem that exponential technology has a history of solving.
Productivity is the main reason companies want to automate workforces. Yet, time and again, the largest increases in productivity don’t come from replacing humans with machines, but rather from augmenting machines with humans.
we found that firms achieve the most significant performance improvements when humans and machines work together.”
The organization’s ultimate goal is to get people to understand that if you’re trying to protect against existential risks—then you need to think long term.
This kind of thinking is mandatory. Even without technological advancement, the Earth is a living system where change is a constant. Originally, our atmosphere was a delightful combination of methane and sulfur, until a poison gas called oxygen came along and ruined everything. The dinosaurs enjoyed a spot as the uber-dominant creature on our planet until the dinosaurs enjoyed a spot in our museums, celebrating their onetime uber-dominance. In a turbulent world, unless we’d like to join the dinosaurs, we need to master this art of prevention.
In our exponential world, agility beats stability, so why own when you can lease? And why lease when you can crowdsource?
